Monthly Archives: June 2013

Recently Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) issues the rank of Malaysia universities compared to other universities in Asia. The QS World University Rankings with London home base is regarded as one of the three most influential and widely observed international university rankings, along with the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universitie. In Malaysia the nation’s five oldest universities are in the top 100 of the 2013 QS University Rankings: Asia for the second consecutive year. Universiti Malaya ranked at 33, followed by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia at 57 and Universiti Sains Malaysia at 61. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia is placed 68 while Universiti Putra Malaysia is ranked at 72.The entire list for Malaysian universities is observable below:

How does Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) come to this conclusion?

The ranking method had not changed from the previous years and was based on academic reputation (40%), employer reputation (10%), student/faculty ratio (20%), papers per faculty/citations per paper (20%) internationalization orientation (10 %).

The most controversial part of the QS World University Rankings is their use of an opinion survey referred to as the Academic Peer Review to determine academic reputation. Using a combination of purchased mailing lists and applications and suggestions, this survey asks active academicians across the world about the top universities in fields they know about and this score counted for 50% in 2004 and starting from 2005 becomes 40%.

Student/faculty ratio is a classic measure to determine teaching commitment. Big class indicates less commitment as teachers should share a limited amount of attention to many students, while the small class indicates committed teachers devoting enough time for sufficient interaction during teaching and learning process. This item is counted for 20 %.

Citations of published research are among the most widely used inputs to national and global university rankings. The QS World University Rankings used citations data from Thomson (now Thomson Reuters) from 2004 to 2007, and since then uses data from Scopus, part of Elsevier. The total number of citations for a five-year period is divided by the number of academicians in a university to yield the score for this measure, which accounts for 20 per cent of a university’s possible score in the Rankings.

Employer reputation is obtained by a similar method to the Academic Peer Review, except that it samples recruiters who hire graduates on a global or significant national scale to produce 10 per cent of any university’s possible score in the belief that graduate quality is a barometer of teaching quality.

The final 10 % of a university’s possible score is derived from measures intended to capture their internationalism: 5 % t from their percentage of international students, and another 5 % from their percentage of international staff. This is of interest partly because it shows whether a university is putting effort into being global, but also because it tells us whether it is taken seriously enough by students and academics around the world for them to want to be there.

So, when a university is not included on the list, it means that serious effort must be made to make the school:

1. To be recognized widely by global scholars so that recommendation is granted as a reputable school.

2. To set the proper and ideal ratio between the number of lecturers and students to maximize interaction during teaching and learning

3. To encourage and to stimulate lecturers to publish their findings in highly reputable journals (at least visible in Google Scholars ) because research without publication is like playing a good music in concert hall but there is no audience. What is the value?

4. To focus more on international marketing to attract expatriate to work in the university and foreign students to come to study at the university.

So..is your university included? Please check at this link http://bit.ly/17oHDKH for full details Asian Universities.